Paintball guns, available now for over 20 years, have become an increasingly popular part of the array of recreational options available to those seeking a release from the pressures of the modern world. A typical paintball gun shoots out a stream of balls as long as the trigger pressure is maintained and balls are available. The balls, too bulky to store in the gun itself, are kept in a hopper atop the gun and fed into the gun by the hopper.
Although there has been a desire to have gun/hopper combinations that can fire paintballs at a rate faster than the currently available 18 balls per second, it is true that a very fast rate would cause such a rapid depletion that those having a paintball competition would have to refill their hoppers constantly. Competitive paintball teams, in particular, could make use of gun/hopper combinations that operated in some optimized range, currently unavailable.